A Day Without Mammon

Now I have reached the age of judgment giving sorrow that many men have come to, the verdict of regret, remembering the world once better than it is, my old walkways beneath the vanished trees, and friends lost now in loss of trust.

And I recall myself more innocent than I am, gone past coming back in the history of flaw, except Christ dead and risen in my own flesh shall judge, condemn, and then forgive. — Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

T. S. Eliot said that April was “the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land/Mixing memory and desire. . . .” April in Maryland comes with the shyness of spring amidst the last blows of winter and before the blast furnace of summer’s heat and humidity. It’s a narrow sliver of chance that could fall, from day to day, any number of ways of weather, rising 30 degrees in a matter of hours or dropping wearily into thunderstorms at the end of a serene day. One never knows.

Somewhere in there is Easter, a mixed blessing of a holy day if there ever was one. Over the years I’ve come to a restless peace with it, but not without a struggle. For a Christian, Easter is both despair and hope, a spiritual slingshot into faith’s parallel universe. In a matter of hours, remembering and following the broken trail of Christ, we stagger under the brute fact of political and spiritual hegemonies crushing the life from the One among the many, bringing darkness—and then unbearable light. 

Easter is prime time for many preachers, a kind of telethon of emotional chaos intended to wring the last drop of guilt out of compassion-fatigued parishioners. A few years ago Mel Gibson’s masochistic Passion of the Christ was playing to full houses in churches and sanctuaries, as well as theaters. This year we face only the usual seasonal froth of bunnies, Easter eggs, cards, and sales on spring outfits. 

I’m not complaining that commercial interests have rendered Easter just another benchmark for profit or loss. That’s a given. Nor would I want a state-sponsored day of fasting and prayer imposed on all. Under the principle of the separation of church and state we’ve gained considerable freedom from the kinds of sanctimonious peril visited upon Europe for centuries. Instead, I’d cherish a neutral day, as transparent as water, in which it was understood that Easter was a time when one could reflect on one’s past, feel a just measure of shame for having broken promises and adding to the pain of the world, and experience a sense of wonder at forgiveness and the chance to begin anew. It is a day and an occasion when anyone can find the courage to go on. If nothing else, it’s a celebration of another chance, the earth rising from the depths of winter, stretching and yawning in the early light. 

By now Christianity has tangled itself so inextricably with power and pain that such a day can only be experienced quietly within oneself—or in the company of a few friends. There’s nothing stopping this from happening, of course, for all who wish to worship and reflect. What am I really asking for then? I suppose it comes down to this: I long for an Easter that is simply there for the taking, with no taint of commercialism or profiteering. A holiday from Mammon, if you like; one day out of the year that is voluntarily cordoned off from exploitation. This would mean that we would not be bludgeoned with direct mail offers in February about Easter sales nor would we be exhorted to whip ourselves into shape for the beach season. We could let the rabbits get on with getting it on, let the eggs remain in the nest, and leave the baby chicks in their natural state, unsullied by dyes of purple, red, green, and blue. 

It’s too much to ask, I know, and besides how would such a day come about? It would have to be legislated, thus defeating the purpose or bubble up from below as corporations, media, sports franchises, and the whole vast Difference Engine of calculated profit simply paused. And in that stillness, without the bullying shouts of the traders or the frantic piping of the media or the inexorable pressure of the invisible hand between our shoulder blades we could hear our hearts beating and take a breath. 

For some it would be a day to allow oneself to smile in amazement at the fecundity of the earth, for others a day of reflection and meditation, a renewed commitment, perhaps, to accepting grace and extending forgiveness. For nations it could be a day of atonement, asking forgiveness for the wrongs done in the name of ideologies and self-interest. And for this beautiful, wondrous, and besieged Earth it could be a day when our presence upon it as a species brought more good than harm. 

As for myself, I shall read the Gospel stories once again, read T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday as I have for some years, and carry within me that stillness, if only for a few hours, that is so vital to the spirit. 

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood 
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee (Eliot, Ash Wednesday).

The Filings of Faith

“We know that the salvation of man is perhaps impossible. But that, we insist, that is no reason to stop seeking it . . . . There is only one thing left to try: the simple, modest path of honesty without illusion, of wise loyalty, of tenacity, which strengthens only human dignity. We believe that idealism is in vain.” — Albert Camus, 4 November 1944 in Combat, a journal of resistance in occupied France

When I was nineteen I met a man who seemed to know everything about his job. I was going to college in England that year, and was traveling on the Continent during the winter break. It was in Rome, at the central Termini train station, close to midnight when the shifts changed, that I saw him take his place.  He walked in from the back of the ticket facility, sat down, and with nothing in front of him began to answer questions, now in Italian, now in German, now in French, Spanish, and English. His left arm rested on the desk in front of him, his gaze shifted only from one face to another in the line of waiting customers. He was not selling train tickets, he was simply answering questions. He spoke rapidly, with a slight frown on his face, as if these were matters of such little consequence that people could figure them out on their own if only they had the patience. He was directing travelers to many different platforms, for trains leaving at this time, arriving at that time, with stops here and here, with luggage restrictions, passes to the hospitality car, and whether one could sleep on the train; all were answered coolly, without moving a muscle. 

He was not one to consult tables, schedules, maps, or memos. And while he did not raise his voice nor act as if the burden of saving such benighted souls was too much to bear, neither did he lack authority. These days a man in his position would have three screens, a database or two, a printed edition of that month’s schedules, and a map of the walking tours of Roma. His authority came from his knowledge, gathered in experience, offered up without charge. 

I was vastly impressed. I wanted to be that knowledgeable about something—anything! An innocent abroad, I was receptive to anything that moved. Constantly observing the particulars of the countries I was traveling through, I sought for the generalities that would allow for pronouncements: “Italians do this, Germans do that. . . . a French person would never be caught dead doing this. . . .” And so on. 

I was also breathing in a volatile mix of the Gospels, Albert Camus, Henry David Thoreau, and the poets of the Romantic period. From the Gospels there gradually rose to light, like a photo print wavering into solidity under the chemical baths of the darkroom, the figure of Jesus. In my reading he was compassionate but tough, a man accustomed to sorrow and not afraid to die. I loved him and fancied that we might be friends. He seemed to me solid at the core, a man whose truth was won through experience and whose silence spoke of strength. 

Camus, like Jesus, offered a clear-eyed vision of the world, but with considerably less comfort. If Jesus spoke of love, Camus hinted at compassion. Of the two virtues love was the  ideal always out of reach, compassion closer to hand. Camus was a realist, skeptical of certainty, feet on the ground, a heart throbbing with intensity, holding suicide at arms’ length while he soberly examined it. In my exalted romanticism I could not foresee life past 30. There were no words for that kind of sanguine capitulation to the commonplace and so I bravely bore myself along in the present, marching to Thoreau’s ‘different drummer’ and reveling in the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion of life.’

I had no certainty about anything, no real knowledge, no convictions that could bear the scrutiny of hard questioning. What I had were longings dressed as hopes and the assurance that comes from innocence. I knew that my Redeemer lived, and if I was not willing to answer the street preachers in Berkeley who asked if I was saved, it was not for lack of faith but rather from a stubborn trust that honesty was the best policy. Who could know for sure, for absolute certain? My best bet was to reveal all—doubts, fears, hopes—but to Jesus alone, not to my community, so that my life would be authentic if nothing else. 

I can see now that my fascination with the answer man in the  Termini central train station in Rome was a mix of envy, longing, and doubt. Envy at the vast amount of information he had mastered, longing to have mastered something, and doubt as to the possibility of mastering anything. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect’ hummed like an electrical charge through the wires that fenced me off from the wide world. An impossible command, like asking donkeys to fly. Better by far, I thought, was Camus’ quiet challenge: ‘This is a question of serving the dignity of man by methods that remain dignified in the midst of a history that is not.’ 

But the recognition that pursuing perfection in the spiritual life just as soon leads to perdition does not mean one escapes the anxiety of falling short in all the other areas of life. How can I claim to be a ‘professor’ when I do not know or have forgotten much of what I profess? How to explain the contradictions in one’s life that fracture our reflections like broken mirrors? Do we ever act from motives untainted by self-interest? Am I making a difference in this world? 

I was moved by Camus because he refused to buy cheap grace nor was he willing to give in to a self-indulgent despair. He had, in Jacques Barzun’s phrase, a ‘cheerful pessimism’ that was unyielding in its hope for humankind. He was a philosopher of the street, keeping his senses alive, rejoicing in life and the struggle for honesty. He shared with another of my philosopher ancestors, Gabriel Marcel, the ability to learn at each bend of the path through life. Marcel, in a passage that has become something of a sacred mantra in my life, speaks in quiet exaltation when he prays:

“O spirit of metamorphosis! When we try to obliterate the frontier of clouds which separates us from the other world guide our unpracticed movements! And, when the given hour shall strike, arouse us, eager as the traveller who straps on his rucksack while beyond the misty windowpane the earliest rays of dawn are faintly visible!"

Marcel, like Camus, was writing in Paris in 1944. Both had lived through the occupation and liberation and both were sifting for hope amidst the confusion and bitterness of post-war France. Marcel, the Christian, found it in a personal vision of Jesus and the community as the body of Christ. Camus, the reluctant atheist, found it in a refusal to capitulate to evil and in solidarity with others. We do not have to be perfect nor can we know everything. But I find myself—truly I find myself—in the company of those whose doubt and uncertainties attract, like a magnet, the filings of faith. 

Making Waves for Fun and Profit

“When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

I read somewhere that pilots about to break the sound barrier can see the wave building around their wings before they burst through to the other side. Sound as light and matter. 

It’s a metaphor that came to mind as the stories of the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the Etch-A-Sketch slip of the tongue from the Romney camp built, crested, and broke in a matter of hours. It’s almost wrong to mention these events in the same sentence: the shooting of a young, unarmed black male teenager by a “neighborhood watch” vigilante takes one’s breath away. The Etch-A-Sketch fracas is high comedy—and the fact that sales—and stock value—of the beloved childhood toy shot up in the wake of the gaffe is simple proof that there is nothing that cannot be turned to commercial purposes. No doubt hoodie sales will increase because Trayvon Martin was wearing one when he was shot. Someone somewhere will come out with a commemorative one emblazoned with his portrait and a slogan. 

And therein lies the agony and the ecstasy of our current media. Personal pain becomes public property. What is done in darkness is shouted from the rooftops. Justice ignored becomes justice exposed. All to the good, but at what cost?

The shooting story built for nearly a month before it went viral. As near as I can tell, ABC News was the first to break the story of questionable police conduct in the investigation of the shooting, and after that the wave of public interest crested. A website gathered a quarter of a million signatures in a matter of days. At one point they were pouring at the rate of 10,000 an hour. The parents asked the Justice Department and the FBI to get involved in the case because the local sheriff had bungled the handling of it. A march was organized in New York and, inevitably, the Reverend Al Sharpton could be found organizing another in the Florida town where the tragedy occurred. Celebrities like Justin Bieber and Spike Lee tweeted about it and President Obama pledged in a press conference to get to the bottom of the case. Newt Gingrich, trailing badly in the Republican primaries, took the time to criticize the president for his ‘divisive’ remarks. In Gingrich’s view this is not a racial issue but an American issue. This from a man who unified his party through the art of divisiveness while Speaker of the House. 

I happened to be reading Marshall McLuhan, that media oracle of the 60s, this week. Reading McLuhan is both exhilarating and tiring because his writing style mimics the ripple effect from throwing a rock into a pool of water. Several of them. All at once. Here comes a ripple from a center point and—oh, there’s another—and look!, here comes another one! The cumulative effect is like hearing French horns in a fog: It’s lovely and mysterious, but you can’t tell which direction the sound is coming from. 

Nevertheless, several passages seemed to cast some light upon the way media attention to events convey, shape, and accelerate responses. “Myth,” says McLuhan, “is the instant vision of a complete process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.” *

A local incident, one family’s unspeakable horror, becomes a national and even international event through two factors. The first is the mythic nature of the story, all too familiar in our society. A young black man is killed because he neatly fit into a matrix constructed through fear and ignorance. The fact that young black men are killed in disproportionate numbers in America is part of our “American Skin,” as Bruce Springsteen famously sang. The second thing is that this mythic story, easily reduced to a couple of lines and endlessly amplified and recycled through the global village, is transformed through a complex of media into a commodity which can be repackaged and resold. The shelf life is short, but that simply drives up the value of the product. 

It’s a Faustian bargain we make. If you’ve got a cause worth shouting about can you afford not to run it through the media mill? Recently, one organization’s cause went viral with the result that millions heard the story and were moved to action of some kind. 

The Invisible Children organization put up a 30-minute documentary about Joseph Kony and his notorious Lord’s Resistance Army. Within days millions saw it, wrote petitions, and influenced policy makers to redouble efforts to hunt down Kony for crimes against humanity. 

Naturally, one of the effects of this public relations coup was that the social media industry tried to capture and bottle the essence of the campaign. If only every cause could learn to go viral like that! they were saying. There is almost unlimited power to reach and influence the world through Vimeo, YouTube, and other media. But it’s not clear why one effort is a hit while another just tanks. Whatever the reasons, it’s not magic nor can it be reduced to a formula. 

Sadly, the attention generated by the cause was almost rivaled by the very public psychological breakdown of the director and narrator of the film, Jason Russell. Russell was found, naked and agitated, pacing back and forth outside his headquarters in San Diego—all of it captured on video and seen, no doubt, by millions.  

But there are too many variables in the success of the “Kony 2012” campaign, and even the “Million Hoodie March” campaign on behalf of Trayvon Martin, for anyone to draw firm conclusions on the method at this point. The most we can say, it seems to me, is that the tools of social media can have extraordinary reach. That’s a result, not a cause. 

McLuhan dropped another pebble in the water for me when he said in Understanding Media, “Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.” When almost any incident, from the shooting of a teenager to a gaffe by a campaign advisor to a call for a global hunt for a criminal to the latest wardrobe malfunction of some celebrity can get its 15 minutes or more on the world’s stage we lose the ability to differentiate between acts. For people constantly locked on to changes in each ring of the media circus McLuhan sardonically notes, “The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.” 

 “There’s something happenin’ here/What it is ain’t exactly clear,” sang Buffalo Springfield back in the day. Is it good? Is it bad? Some of each, most likely. One thing is sure, according to Marshall McLuhan: No medium is neutral, it's goodness or evil determined by the ones who pull the trigger and the use to which they put it. The medium is the message.

Goldman Sachs and the Two Smiths

“If the moral sense is the result of nothing more significant than a cultural or historical throw of the dice, then it will occur to some people who by reason of temperament or circumstances are weakly attached to their own moral senses that they are free to do whatever they can get away with by practicing indulgent self-absorption or embracing an angry ideology.” — James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense

 This week, close on the Ides of March, saw Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs of London, resign in disgust at the moral degeneracy he saw up close for 12 years. In an articulate and scathing op-ed piece in The New York Times, Smith recounted how the culture that had sustained the trust of clients for 143 years has disappeared. “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for,” said Smith. “It astounds me,” he went on, “how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

Smith recounted how he had recruited and managed the 80 student interns who had survived the process that winnowed out thousands.  “I knew it was time to leave,” he says, “when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

He signed off with a plea to the board of directors to “get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm—or the trust of its clients—for very much longer.” 

The next day Goldman Sachs stock dropped by $2.7 billion, a fact that some market analysts rushed to explain as just the daily vicissitudes of the market. 

Smith’s op-ed piece went viral, Goldman Sachs’ PR machine responded aggressively, and the thundering herd of pundits, Wall Street wonks, and competitors formed up for the ritual denunciations, analyses, and prognostications. Mayor Bloomberg even took time out of his busy schedule to go down to Goldman Sachs and offer his condolences on such a public drubbing. 

There were a variety of responses to Smith’s cri de coeur. Many, like Bloomberg, took it personally and saw it as a betrayal of corporate loyalty. Others, like The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan, couldn’t resist going for Smith’s jugular and heaping scorn on his shock. Zachary Karabell, also writing for The Beast, likewise took Smith to task for naiveté. “What profession did he think he was entering?” he asked, “Social work?” Karabell called for us all to lay off Goldman Sachs, to realize that people can be greedy anywhere, and that Wall Street should not be held to a higher standard than other professions. 

A common assumption running through much of the commentary is that this is the way things are and there’s nothing to be done about it. Everybody looks out for Number #1, everybody gets ahead by any means necessary, and everybody’s Greedometer is bending the needle. Much of the huffing and puffing over Greg Smith’s op-ed was of this defensive tone, evidence, it seems to me, of the elite closing ranks to justify their actions. 

This is an assumption that should be scrutinized. The implication is that this is how successful business is conducted; those who would win—or just break even—have to be willing to cut ethical corners and kill when necessary. This is turning an “is” into an “ought,” or at the very least turning ‘the way things are’ into de facto rules of the universe. It takes utilitarian ethics (the greatest good for the greatest number of people) and turns it into ‘the end justifies the means and we’ll get there by any means necessary.’

There are those who seem to actually believe this, and a few of them are now in jail—Jeffrey Skilling of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, and Bernie Madoff come to mind. But there are many more who accept this passively and live as if this were Reality. 

James Q. Wilson, whom I’ve quoted at the top of this essay, was probably the leading social scientist of his generation. In his book, The Moral Sense, he cautioned that we must resist the temptation to chalk up all the problems in our society to moral failure. Nevertheless, he makes the case that there is a moral sense in people which guides them in making decisions everyday. If it is not relativized away or simply ignored because ‘everyone else is doing it,’ this moral sense generally guides us to do the right thing. 

Like Wilson, “I am interested in why people act as they do, but I am more interested in why people judge actions as they do.” The outrage at Greg Smith’s dramatic exit from Goldman Sachs reveals a bedrock belief that free market capitalism is as cutthroat and duplicitous as it needs to be. But Wilson argues that a social order that shifts individual responsibility to expedient cultural norms will not question such unethical means because 1) they work in the short term, and 2) we lack the ability to speak and to reason of moral matters anyway. We have a moral sense, Wilson asserts, “but it is not always and in every aspect of life strong enough to withstand a pervasive and sustained attack.”

Greg Smith’s op-ed piece came at a time when people are fed up with the callousness of Wall Street and bankers in general, and are realizing that no amount of cajoling on the part of government or occupying of property will change the ingrained habits of a relatively few powerful and morally twisted people. I don’t believe—and neither does Smith apparently—that everyone who works at Goldman Sachs buys into the toxic culture he described. But enough of the leadership seems to practice it that many of the employees feel it’s in their best interest to comply. It’s that shrug of the shoulders, the non-verbal equivalent of our ubiquitous dismissal of things difficult to think through with the blasé ‘Whatever’, which reveals the herd mentality. 

Before Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, the Bible of free market capitalism, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work of social and ethical philosophy that is stunning in its psychological insights into our motives. 

He begins by describing sympathy and the natural human capacity to imagine the pain that others must feel as the result of injustice. For Smith, sympathy is the source of human moral sentiments, indeed, of ethics. A society made up of people with the capacity to put themselves in another person’s place will likely be more just than one where people don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. The one virtue that a society most certainly cannot live without is justice. “The violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of.” It was Adam Smith’s firm conviction that kindness and beneficence could not be coerced by force. If a society that is unjust is to change it could only happen if those whose actions hurt people receive widespread condemnation. The ‘invisible hand’ of public morality would drive people away from corrupt markets and would reward the honest ones. 

This may be the only thing that finally brings about change on Wall Street and in the banking industry. Since the language they understand is only that of profit and loss, investors and customers should learn to speak it fluently. Those with money to invest should look for the firms whose ethics are proven by their actions, not by their public relations statements.  There must be some out there who can do right by their clients and the country and still make a profit. Adam Smith believed that all people desire “not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” He thought that those who were condemned would eventually come to judge themselves and thus would undergo a transformation. Wilson, commenting on this, says “At first we judge others; we then begin to judge ourselves as we think others judge us; finally we judge ourselves as an impartial, disinterested third party might . . . . We can fool our friends, but not ourselves.” 

Well, there’s some hope. If losing profit results in some soul-searching among bankers and traders there may be a gradual detoxifying of their poisonous culture. And if Greg Smith’s brave act makes us question unfettered greed as the engine of capitalism, then we may have reached a tipping point.  

On a more personal note, this entry marks a year of weekly posting to Wretched Success. I've learned a lot in the process—and I've signed up for another round. I hope you'll join me!

Pick the Habit

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. — William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology

I am a creature of habit. And so are you. And that’s a good thing, according to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit (Random House, 2012), and reporter at The New York Times. 

Duhigg became interested in the research being done on habits while in Baghdad covering the war. It occurred to him that the U.S. military “is one of the biggest habit-formation experiments in history.” His interest led him to hundreds of experiments, thousands of articles and books, interviews with Paul O’Neill, Tony Dungy, Howard Schultz of Starbucks,  and many others, and into the labs of the foremost neuroscientists of our time. 

Research into habits isn’t new, of course. Aristotle based his ethics on practicing the virtues until they became habitual, second nature. William James devoted a chapter of his Principles of Psychology to it in 1890 and returned to it repeatedly throughout his career, calling us ‘mere bundles of habit,’ and remarking that ‘The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work (Talks to Teachers).’ John Dewey based his Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a social psychology, on the development of morals through the formation of powerful habits of conduct. 

That approach to growing up certainly was part of the upbringing of several generations of American and British children since the 1920s. We were taught to cultivate good habits and shun the bad ones, learning through cultural norms and precepts which could be trusted and which to stifle. 

What is new is the confirmation, through extensive research and experimentation, of many of these early conjectures and hypotheses. Duhigg’s approach is to focus first on how habits develop in our lives, then how companies and organizations instill habits in the lives of their employees and customers, and finally, to examine how movements within societies harness the power of habits to transform the culture and ethos. 

His central idea is that ‘habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.’ We build them consciously, as we gain more practice, layer upon layer, day to day, until they come to govern most of our actions. The key is understanding that what was put together can be taken apart and reassembled for different results. It’s no panacea for all our problems, but much of what we put off doing because it’s too hard could be accomplished through the conscious cultivation of habits. 

What scientists and psychologists have discovered is a basic three-part loop: cue, routine, and reward. In order to change a habit, says Duhigg, we first find the routine that meets some hidden need. Then we experiment with the rewards, built to satisfy our cravings. Third, we isolate the cue, what sets us off in playing through a habit, and finally, if we’re serious about change, we come up with a plan. 

On the idea that understanding is more than half the battle won, Duhigg gives us example after example of people discovering the loops, developing them, and changing their lives, however incrementally. 

Paul O’Neill took over Alcoa as CEO in 1987, and made it his mission to turn the company into the safest place to work in America. He had the idea that transforming the working habits that resulted in at least one accident a week at most of Alcoa’s plants might have a ripple effect throughout the organization. He was right. Changing the mentality of everyone at Alcoa—management to line workers—about safety not only resulted in the company’s worker injury rate dropping to one-twentieth of the average in America, but net income and market capitalization soared in the years O’Neill led the company. 

O’Neill believed that certain ‘keystone habits’ have the power to ripple through an organization, changing everything. Focusing on priorities rather than attempting to do everything exactly right, O’Neill found that workers now felt empowered to make suggestions and change routines that made their lives safer and their productivity skyrocket. 

Tony Dungy, coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, drilled his team on the basics, reducing the time it took to make decisions during a five-second play to automatic responses, thus freeing the players to react instantaneously to changes on the field. 

Mark Muraven, a psychologist at Case Western University, began studying willpower as a Ph.D. student. He wondered why willpower sometimes seemed to waver and then grow stronger, only to flounder again. Through a series of ingenious experiments, Muraven and his team discovered that willpower is more than a skill. “It’s a muscle,” he says, “like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.” If you want to change something, then you need to conserve your willpower and not waste it on tedious tasks. 

Muraven’s research was picked up by other researchers who extended it to other areas. What they discovered was that when willpower was built up and grew stronger, it touched everything else in a person’s life. Those who developed a habit of exercising regularly found it easier to eat more healthfully, work more efficiently, and have more satisfying personal relationships. 

But the flip side of habits is also explored. Duhigg examines the case of a woman whose gambling habit eventually took over her life, resulting in her losing a $1 million inheritance, her home, and her family. The power of habits is such that they can transform our lives for the better or ruin us. 

Once again, understanding how habits work is essential to harnessing all that power for the good. Duhigg cautions that there is no magic formula for speedily changing habits. Just as they build up over time, so it takes time to substitute routines, isolate the cues, and reap the rewards. Moreover, the infinite number of variables in any one person’s experience renders a formula useless. There isn’t one formula, says Duhigg. There are thousands. His aim throughout the book is to reveal the process of building habits and provide a guide to how to experiment with them. 

William James thought the development of habits so important that he urged teachers to ingrain the most useful ones into the lives of their students. “Education is for behavior,” he said in 1892, “and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.” 

Any of our routines can become habits, usually below the level of our awareness. But that needn’t be the case, and if we want to pilot our ship instead of being a stowaway, paying attention to our habits offers a direct route. 

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. He could also have said, the unlived life is not worth examining. Either way it’s a fair bet that habits will be involved, habits that if put in place can free us up, both individuals and societies, for the more pressing problems we face. 

Andrew Breitbart, Your Bell is Tolling

“. . . . it has become an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellowman.” — William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating”

Andrew Breitbart is dead at the age of 43. A warrior for conservative causes, he became a self-styled scourge of political and social liberals through his websites and videos. You might say, with Thomas Hobbes, that his public life was nasty, brutish, and short. 

Just last week he was in Washington, DC screaming obscenities at Occupy Washington and calling them freaks and animals. It’s hard not to think that he simply blew up, all that bile and red-hot anger just incinerating his heart. 

Upon his death many of the right-wing elite weighed in. Sarah Palin vowed to fight on in the endless battle against liberal corruption that Breitbart so valiantly waged. Even Romney released a generic condolence note, while Limbaugh called for “a thousand more Breitbart’s” in America. One of his fans, writing at the Fox Nation website, quoted at length from Ecclesiastes, comparing him to the wise man and reminding all readers that America was built by people like Breitbart. “This is not about politics—an aggressively corrupt vocation, at best—but rather the active living out of one’s faith in God and country; fully recognizing that this country was founded by men of faith. . . . on the principles of the Judao-Christian (sic) Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 

And so the lionization begins of a man who vilified Ted Kennedy after his death, calling him “a special pile of excrement,” among other things, and who assassinated the character of Shirley Sherrod, a United States Department of Agriculture official. Breitbart edited a videotape of Sherrod speaking at a conference so that it appears she made racist remarks about white farmers, when she was really describing how her attitudes had changed over the years. Breitbart lied, distorted evidence, and rejoiced when she was falsely accused and fired. Unrepentant to the last he vowed never to apologize to her. That was how he made his living—and apparently he loved his work. 

As David Frum, a conservative writer and columnist—and a man who knew Breitbart well—said recently, “Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise.”

That’s his legacy—giving a generation of conservative young journalists license to stab the body politic, trash-talk their way through column inches and video moments, and write the kind of drivel that not even a mother could love. 

I couldn’t stand the things he did, I didn’t think he was funny, and I found his values abhorrent. If he served as a catalyst for people’s hatred toward those he chose to crucify, then the world is fractionally better off now that he’s dead. Because he constantly thrust himself into the hot lights of arcade journalism, we only have his public persona to decipher. If there was a kinder, gentler Andrew behind his sneer he certainly kept it on a short chain.

Yet, he’s a fascinating case study for a political culture that has become both poisonous and ludicrous. No society with a majority of people like him could survive. But the very values he excoriated of tolerance, fairness, equality of justice, thinking before you speak and perceiving the world from multiple perspectives, allowed him the freedom to be himself. 

It’s possible that Breitbart might have moderated his style as he matured. With time, some personal pain and loss, and at least a hint of humility, he might have become a powerful and eloquent voice for conservative issues. But I doubt it. His consistency lay in his ability to disregard any viewpoint but his own. With the notoriety he gained and the money he was paid he had no incentive to stop and think before he flew into a rage. 

A lot of people admired him, no doubt for some of the same reasons we venerate Mafia bosses, thuggish musicians, and arrogant athletes: they do what they like and stand over against the crowd. 

I don’t hate the man because I don’t want to be seduced by the very weapons he used to hack his way through the world. If he were drowning I’d hope I’d have the presence of mind to do what I could to save him simply because he was in need. In that regard, he stands for all of us, one of the family of humanity in all its twisted, fallen, and forgivable potential. And his death reminds us that our freedoms, stretched at times to the breaking point when extended to people like him, must be preserved in the particular case in order that all of us may enjoy them.

The Law of Happiness

“. . . . happiness is affected more by one’s movement toward (or away from) success than by one’s position near (or far from) it. . . . So the law of happiness says happiness waxes and wanes in direct proportion to a sense of progress toward or away from a goal, a worthy cause, a creation, a companion to be loved.” — Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life

One of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Outliers, made the claim that successful people achieved their success more by working very hard than by native talent. In fact, their level of success could be predicted by the hours, days, weeks, and years that they kept at their craft. Those who worked hard and long did better than those who worked occasionally or half-heartedly. The “Duh factor” kicks in here, of course—you’d expect people who practiced the piano six hours every day to do much better than those who tickle the ivories once or twice a week. And while I may have forgotten the finer nuances of Gladwell’s argument, one thing I took away from the book is this: those who found enjoyment in the process of working to become the best were more likely to stick with it. And somewhere along the line other people noticed and counted them successful. 

This ability to find oneself in the practice runs against the common belief that our lives only begin in the end. “Wait until you’re older,” we say to those younger than ourselves. “You’ll find out what I mean when you get out into the real world,” we say to students, a warning to be graciously ignored since there is no reason to think that the life of a student is anything but real. “Work hard, think positively, and one day you’ll be on top,” the saying goes. As sayings go this one goes two-thirds of the way until it becomes mired in the mud of probabilities instead of certainties. 

Working hard is guaranteed only to make you adept and expert at what you do. Thinking positively begins as optimism and becomes faith in hope through adversity, never a bad thing. Inevitably reaching the top is not a foregone conclusion, no matter how hard you work. But it is a sure thing that if you don’t work hard your odds of success, much less rising to the top, will quickly diminish. Thus, behind most overnight sensations is a person who put in the time, usually a lot of time, to make it all look so easy.

I’ve been reading a biography of Bruce Springsteen, a man whose music inspires me and whose determination, even in his twenties, was formidable. Living lean, scratching out a living from day to day by playing in clubs, he worked on his music with a single-minded focus. He resisted all attempts to change his style, to use studio musicians instead of the guys he grew up with, and to practice being derivative of what was on the radio. He heard his songs in his head and he made them come out into the air in the way he wanted. 

Although his music is definitively his own he listened and learned from the rock ’n roll greats—Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, Bill Haley, and others—and he has distilled that legacy into the raw essentials of his own vision. 

Sting, another musician whose artistic range seems constantly to be expanding, has surrounded himself with people who, by his own reckoning, are better musicians than he is. Every collaboration offers him another chance to learn, to add to the collage of nuances and meanings he can draw from his own creative process. 

I am drawn to these people, not just because their music has defined and surrounded so many of the ways I experience the world, but also because of their open-hearted stance toward the dazzling, heartbreaking, searing, poignant prospect of becoming human. As artists they have pared away the distractions while remaining free to pick up what moves them from others. They have the humility to learn, the creativity to shape and produce art, and a work ethic that strives for the fullness of their imaginations. 

A. C. Grayling reminds us that “The first lesson of happiness is that the surest way to be unhappy is to think that happiness can be directly sought.” It can’t be, he says, because it is a by-product of other things. “And what it is a by-product of is those activities that are worthwhile in themselves, that bring satisfaction and achievement in the doing, that give one a sense of well-doing and well-being.”

Tonight, walking alone in the night with the wind gusting about me, heading for home and light and love and warmth, I could not help but smile, realizing by those measures, through the grace of God, family, and friends, I am a most blessed and happy man.